The Human League - Dare

I really love this album. This was the first CD I ever bought, even before I had a player to play it on! I bought the vinyl copy as a picture disc in December 1981 and played it several times and just thought it was a great pop album. It contains four hit singles, The Sound Of The Crowd, Love Action, Open Your Heart and the worldwide smash Don't You Want Me. It was released in October 1981 and later in 1982 in America and couldn't be any different than the previous two albums by the band.

The original line up of The Human League, split up in late 1980 (the other 2 members went to form Heaven 17) and with Phil Oakey guiding the band wanted to be more of a pop band than the electronic group the old band was. Virgin wanted hits from the band so they recruited Suzanne Sully & Joanne Catherall to salvage a European tour. Virgin put them with producer Martin Rushent and the result was Sound Of The Crowd which was a decent hit reaching 12 in the UK charts, Virgin were happy and making the album went ahead.

Love Action was released in the summer of 1981 and climbed to number 3, Open Your Heart reached number 6 and was used to market the albums following release. Dare went straight to number 1 in the album charts and at the end of 1981 Don't You Want Me was released. This song ended up being the biggest selling single in the UK in 1981 and also the Christmas number one of that year too! Not bad for a song that Phil Oakey didn't think was a hit, they even put it at the end of the album as they didn't think of it that much, it ended up being a worldwide smash!

The Human League rode the success of the album well, but came the day they had to follow it up. Not many bands can follow such a successful album and they realised that. I remember watching an interview with Martin Rushent and he said it was an album of the time, one that just came together. When it came to record the follow up they struggled as they didn't know how they came up with Dare, it just happened! Martin Rushent was working on remastering Dare and rumours of extra unreleased tracks that were recorded for the album were getting sorted, but Martin died before the project was sorted and I read that his son was concidering taking on the project, fingers crossed he does! Here is the classic album sleeve, an idea taken from Vogue magazine!